Slashdot Mirror
Is the iPod Shuffle Playing Favorites?
marksilverman writes "Steven Levy at Newsweek is reporting that his iPod Shuffle seems to favor certain songs. Is Apple receiving kickbacks to promote certain artists? Apple denies it, of course, and Levy had the good sense to ask a mathmatician and a cryptographer who explained that it's probably just humans finding patterns where there are none." Less neurotically, both CNet and PCWorld have discussions of the Shuffle's interior spaces.
I'm not sure why it would require firmware updates, or at least deliberate interaction. They could definitely make iTunes send the data to the unit and have it do something about it without your attention; it would be best to have iTunes set some bit somewhere saying which songs are preferred. Then there would be no trivial-to-find evidence on the device.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I agree. It really doesn't make sense for them to have a song played any more than any other one. It's not like playing a song you already own more often is going to make you purchase something. It's not like advertisement...you already have it.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
Who pays for their music downloads, anyway? Crikey.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
well.. they wouldn't really need to - they could just manipulate itunes's autofill(and update the thing there, it could just use the itunes's scoring in which case it would be a feature that they just didn't tell about).
however, it could still be shitty random, choosing only from next 20 or last 20 songs or whatever, making it hover around a particular set of songs(but which would not be chosen).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
For less than $50 in parts (most of them can sampled for free from friendly parts manufacturers, you can easily hack an iPod shuffle... can it run Linux? Yes. A shot of the reassembly.